NEW YORK: Barbara Barrie, the award-nominated actress known for Breaking Away and the original Broadway production of Company, died Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 95.
Her daughter, Jane Harnick, confirmed her death to The New York Times, saying it was medically assisted following a terminal cancer diagnosis. Barrie spent more than six decades working in film, television and theater, earning Oscar, Emmy and Tony nominations along the way.
Barrie earned an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress for her role as the mother of a young cyclist in Breaking Away (1979), a coming-of-age film about an Indiana teenager pursuing his dreams.
She won the best actress award at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival for One Potato, Two Potato, a drama about an interracial marriage in mid-20th-century America. Anne Bancroft shared the award for The Pumpkin Eater.
On Broadway, Barrie was a member of the original cast of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company in 1970. Her performance as Sarah, a wife who takes up karate, earned her a Tony nomination for best featured actress in a musical.
Barrie made her Broadway debut in The Wooden Dish in 1955 and continued performing for decades. Her final Broadway appearance came in 2017, when she played the supportive grandmother in Significant Other.
Her other stage credits included California Suite, The Crucible, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Taming of the Shrew. In 1974, she won both a Drama Desk Award and an Obie Award for her performance in The Killdeer.
Barrie made her film debut with an appearance in Giant in 1956. She later appeared in The Caretakers (1963), The Bell Jar (1979) and Private Benjamin (1980), playing Goldie Hawn’s mother in the comedy.
Television audiences knew Barrie from shows including Barney Miller, where she played the wife of Hal Linden’s police captain, and Suddenly Susan, in which she portrayed Brooke Shields’ grandmother. Her other credits included The Twilight Zone, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Law & Order and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. She earned Emmy nominations for her appearances on Law & Order and its spinoff, as well as for the television adaptation of Breaking Away.
Born Barbara Ann Berman in Chicago on May 23, 1931, Barrie moved with her family to Texas at age 9 and grew up in Corpus Christi. She graduated from the University of Texas in 1952 with a degree in drama. After moving to New York in the early 1950s, she pursued acting through auditions, early television roles and theater work.
Alongside her acting career, Barrie wrote four books. Her novels for young readers included Lone Star and Adam Zigzag. She also wrote Second Act (1997) and Don’t Die of Embarrassment (1999), memoirs about her experience with rectal cancer and a colostomy. She hoped the books would help reduce the stigma surrounding the illness.
In 2014, Barrie revealed that she had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a degenerative lung disease. She was later diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Barrie married Jay Harnick in 1964. He founded and served as artistic director of TheaterWorksUSA and died in 2007. The couple had two children.
She is survived by her daughter, Jane Harnick; her son, Aaron Harnick; and three granddaughters.
